Might set up my 5,000th bluesky account

Spent the best part of a year telling everyone who bemoans doomers to see what the actuaries are thinking

actuaries.org.uk/news-and-med...

I can remember arguments to this effect in the mid-2000s

I welcome the belated recognition that we are facing a resurgent fascism in the UK.

The idea that human beings and their hopes, dreams, and individual desires matter in the slightest is a product of modern capitalist liberalism. The idea that it is wrong to be prejudiced against people who are different is an idea that is entirely contained by and originates with liberalism.

I think it's fair to say these ideologies and their domestic and geopolitical strategies are predicated on this epistemic profile

For example, transphobia reacts to the evident complexity of gender by enforcing rigid binaries, but displacing complexity into legal battles, cultural conflict, and social tension as a result.

I think it's essential to reactionary ideologies in general that they seek to simplify social complexity into legible categories in order to reduce uncertainty.

Besides, attempts to simplify complex systems often doesn't actually reduce complexity, but instead displaces it.

I'm not suggesting you should. But it doesn't seem like the kind of thing one can ignore either. Not that I'm suggesting you are.

Isn't going from complex systems to simpler ones usually called collapse?

I hate being immunocompromised. I am ill right now but I have no idea how ill and no clue as to when I'll get better. Going to get some sleep.

I see what you're getting at but I still don't know. I think the idea underlying substance is misleading. Political actors and movements are agents, not substances.

For example, water always turns into steam under the correct conditions. Not all conservatives reveals themselves as fascists.

I don't think conservatives and fascists want the same arrangement of power. They both want hierarchies but they want different versions of them and disagreed on much besides.

I get that. I just don't think that having many of the same enemies makes them identical.

I don't think they were pointed at identical ends. Even if we consider both conservatism and Nazism as defenses of hierarchy, and even if the hierarchies appear the same in form, they are not the same in occupation, meaning, authority, or purpose.

I agree. Nazism attacked the institutions that conservatism sought to preserve. The Nazis saw conservatism as a failed project.

I notice the agental point is now getting even more abstract. Who is the agent here? The conservatives, the Nazis, or the social order? What does it mean for the social order to know things or act?

This goes back to the point about collusion. I think it's well observed that conservatives wrongly believed they were instrumentalizing the Nazis. When it became clear they couldn't restrain the Nazis, that's when they resisted them.

The Nazi myth functioned was a constructed vision with an invented narrative. It wasn't designed to preserve observed and inherited institutions. The point of the former is to restrain, the latter to mobilize transformative power. That is a significant difference.

I think of them as related by family resemblance rather than phases of a single worldview. Their relatedness is what let's many conservatives under pressure shift into fascism. But I think there really is a shift!

Even the forms of power they justified were distinct (centralized as opposed to federal, etc.) and public moralities differ.

But the extra-human orders are entirely distinct, being fundamentally different in nature, and aiming at different things. Their nature, source, and purposes are fundamentally opposed, except at the most abstract level of subordination to an extra-human order.

Why Fascists Always Come for the Socialists First Contrary to right-wing myths that the "Nazis were socialist," fascists despise socialism and want to destroy it. Here's why the left poses such a threat to them.

"One of the longstanding weaknesses of left-wing analyses of the right has been a propensity to see them purely as reactionary...But right-wing doctrines are not defined purely reactionary. They are defined by definite assertions and beliefs of their own."

www.currentaffairs.org/news/why-fas...

The extra-human order conservatives appeal to is transcendent and fairly static; the fascist extra-human order is dynamic, vitalist, and therefore immanent.

Conservative order is meant to provide stability; the fascist order is meant to provide power and struggle.

These aren't the same.

There's lots of ways to distinguish the two, but the most important might be in terms of what they want.

Conservatives want stability and the preservation of established institutions; fascists are revolutionary, seeking to dismantle old institutions to build a new, totalising state.

There is something to the general claim that conservatism and fascism share a basic reactive logic and can align when it is threatened, but the stronger claim of ‘same ends, different intensities’ holds only at a thin and abstract level. However, this article is well worth reading!

Peeling away to be myself

Oh, I think modalities can be very ill-matched for people. No worries, I think I also maybe overreacted and didn't phrase things very well.

Oops. It didn't ask for things that are false, but things people often think is the case that aren't. I'm out and about with my kid and just replying on the fly when he's busy so not giving my full attention.